.NET

This is another item in my ongoing series of “How to Mess Up Scrum.” This time, I turn your attention to…

Overcomplicating the Objective

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I was on a Scrum team that was assigned to develop a “retail portal” for the services this company already sold at old-fashioned store locations. In “phase one” the goal was to put up half a dozen or so static pages, plus one “contact” page to capture basic information so our sales rep can call you soon. That’s all.

I do lots and lots of development with the .NET platform, mainly because the corporations in the Cleveland area that have money to fund large projects are Microsoft shops.

I used to have a real problem with Microsoft development, back when it was all Windows 95; the tools were expensive, flaky, and unreliable. Since then, the tools have improved to an amazing degree; now I can write code that actually works consistently on more than one computer, and it’s not utterly ridiculous to run Windows on servers anymore. So there’s that.

But in just the last couple of days, I’ve gotten back into the Ruby on Rails environment. Partly, I’m jamming with my college homie Dave Stagner on his amazing Congruence product; and also, I had to update this old Perl script that I’ve been using for years to sort my incoming email.